Forty-cm tsunami wave reaches Kuriles

PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY, April 03, 7:42 /ITAR-TASS/. A 40-cm wave from the powerful Chile earthquake had reached the northern Kuril island of Paramushir, the head of the Sakhalin tsunami monitoring centre, Tatyana Ivelskaya, reported.

At the same time, the tsunami has not come to Kamchatka, said the head of the Kamchatka tsunami monitoring and prevention centre, Alexander Nikolayev.

Nikolayev reported that the monitoring stations had not recorded water rise in the Pacific near the peninsula. There are three stations to monitor tsunami. None of them registered rise of water.

Kamchatka specialists recorded the tsunami in Japan, where the wave was about 40 cm high. The water rose 50 cm at the Hawaii.

On April 2, an earthquake of about 8.0 magnitude struck a Pacific area near the northern coast of Chile. The wave near the epicenter was four metres high. A tsunami alert was issued. The distance between the epicenter and the Russian coast of the Kuriles is about 14,000 km.

The last tsunami disaster hit Kamchatka on November 5, 1952. Waves hit the entire coast of the peninsula and the city of Severo-Kurilsk on the Kuril Islands, killing about 3,000 people. The tsunami was 18 m high in some areas.